When Republicans retook the House majority in 2010, Washington was already standing in the middle of a communications revolution – even if most politicos hadn’t fully realized it.
But the signs were already there. Facebook arrived in 2004, followed quickly by YouTube, Twitter, and then the iPhone – a cascade of technologies that fundamentally changed how people consumed and shared information. But inside Congress, most offices still treated social media as an afterthought.
Press releases were priority. Tweets were just tactical.
Communications shops would spend all day carefully crafting statements, floor speeches, and talking points, then hand the final product off to the “new media” intern to distill into a few tweets. Some offices drafted an entire week’s worth of social posts every Monday morning and put them on autopilot. In many cases, members of Congress didn’t even know they had social media accounts – there was just a press staffer somewhere who was in charge of the password.
Washington tried to bolt old methods onto new platforms. Then the ground shifted. The organizations that adapted early didn’t just tweet more often. They learned to communicate differently. The news cycle sped up. Audiences expected authenticity.
Digital stopped being an accessory to communications and became infrastructure.
I participated in that shift firsthand a few years later while leading digital communications for Speaker John Boehner. At the time, most people’s opinions about Boehner were already formed. My job wasn’t to win every policy argument online. It was to remind people there was an actual human being behind the title: a regular guy with a big job. A midwestern Catholic who liked to cook his own Thanksgiving turkey, cut his own grass, and be in bed by 10 p.m.
One afternoon, while back in Ohio, I filmed a few seconds of John Boehner mowing his lawn. There was no strategy memo behind it. No polling. No message guidance. Instagram had just introduced video, so we posted the 15-second clip almost as an experiment. It exploded.
Suddenly, millions of people were watching the speaker of the House mow his grass. Late-night comedians joked about it. His friends texted him. And for one of the first times, digital inside leadership offices started to feel less like a distribution channel and more like a shift in the way we communicated.
That’s why the current debate around artificial intelligence feels so familiar.
Right now, many organizations in Washington are repeating the same mistake they made with social media 15 years ago: treating transformative technology like a niche function siloed into a single department, instead of a fundamental, operational shift. You know the ones. They think of AI like a magic trick – flooding feeds with glossy, synthetic content that feels obviously fake.
Others are avoiding it altogether because they fear looking artificial or getting caught using it. Both miss the point.
The real impact of AI is not that it can generate content and replace your press secretary. It’s that it can fundamentally change the speed, capability, and contributions of your entire communications team.
Fifteen years ago – heck, even three years ago – if a CEO or member of Congress appeared on television, somebody on staff had to sit there waiting to manually screen-record the segment, clip it, send it to an editor, caption it, export it, upload it, and prepare it for social media. Today, those processes can happen in a fraction of the time. In fact, at my own firm, a non-technical staffer utilized AI to build an automation tool that does this very thing – automatically identifying interviews, pulling clips, generating transcripts, and preparing them for distribution in minutes instead of hours.
AI intensifies the speed at which we can operate in the public affairs space. But it doesn’t replace human judgment. It creates more room for it.
Instead of wasting hours doing robotic tasks, communicators can spend more time on intrinsically human decision-making: Which message actually resonates? Which audience matters most? What story are we trying to tell? Just because AI can produce more content doesn’t mean that content is persuasive. Efficiency is not the same thing as persuasion.
Politics is and will always remain a deeply human business.
People respond to authenticity. They respond to clarity. They respond to emotional resonance and trust. And while AI is remarkably good at pattern recognition, political discourse has a way of surprising everyone. No algorithm could have predicted the twists and turns of American politics over the last decade – because human beings are not spreadsheets.
That’s why the organizations that succeed in the AI era won’t be the ones producing the most artificial content. They’ll be the ones who embrace technology to move faster, think more clearly, and spend more time on the human work that actually changes minds.
Like digital before it, AI shouldn’t be bolted on; it should be built in so that modern organizations can strengthen human judgment rather than replace it.
